4,000 chicks died in the mail. They expose a darker truth about the meat industry.

Late last month, some 14,000 baby chicks in Pennsylvania were shipped from a hatchery — commercial operations that breed chickens, incubate their eggs, and sell day-old chicks — to small farms across the country. But they didn’t get far. They were reportedly abandoned in a US Postal Service truck in Delaware for three-and-a-half days without water, food, or temperature control.

By the time officials arrived at the postal facility, 4,000 baby birds were already dead. The thousands of survivors — mostly chickens, but also some turkeys and quails — were taken to Delaware’s First State Animal Center and SPCA, which worked tirelessly to find homes to take in the animals as pets.

The incident has received extensive national news coverage, and it highlights an often hidden aspect of America’s network of small poultry farms and backyard chicken operations: the shipping of millions of live baby animals in the mail to be raised for eggs or meat.

Most chicks survive their journey through the mail, but many don’t. In 2020, 4,800 chicks shipped to farmers in Maine perished due to postal service delays, while in 2022, almost 4,000 chicks destined for the Bahamas died on the tarmac at Miami International Airport from heat exposure. There are plenty of other stories of chicks dying in the mail, and backyard chicken enthusiasts say it’s not uncommon for a few birds out of every 50 or so that they order from hatcheries to die in the mail or shortly after arriving.

Mass-casualty mail-order events are rare, but when they happen, they tend to receive news attention. It’s a weird-sounding story with aggrieved customers and sometimes, a hopeful outcome, like the thousands of rescued birds in Delaware. But many more farmed animals die in transportation than most of us realize. That’s because these animals — whether raised by backyard poultry enthusiasts or major meat-producing conglomerates — are commodities, and their deaths merely a margin of error baked into the economics of the annual hatching, raising, and slaughtering of billions of chickens for food.

What happens between the factory farm and the slaughterhouse

Animals raised for food are often transported numerous times throughout their lives, and they’re typically treated like cargo rather than living, feeling animals. Sometimes, it’s boxes of day-old chicks shipped through the USPS from a small hatchery to a small farm. But more often, it’s truckloads of fattened-up chickens or pigs moved from a factory farm to a massive slaughterhouse.

More than 9 billion chickens raised for meat annually in the US are kept on factory farms — long, windowless buildings that look more like industrial warehouses than farms. The birds have been bred to grow enormous, which causes a number of health problems, and in these overcrowded facilities, disease spreads quickly. The conditions are so awful that up to 6 percent die before they can even be trucked to the slaughterhouse. That’s over half a billion animals each year.

Once the survivors reach about 6.5 pounds, they’re quickly and tightly packed into crates. Those crates are then stacked one atop another onto a truck bound for the slaughterhouse. They’re still babies, at just 47 days old, but 6.5 pounds is their average “market weight.”

Most chicken farms are located close to a slaughterhouse, so the trip isn’t too long — often 60 miles or less, according to the National Chicken Council.

But “even if it is a short journey, the weather and the stocking density has a huge effect on mortality,” Adrienne Craig, an attorney at the Animal Welfare Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for more humane conditions in animal transport, told me. “They could be transported for 45 minutes and if it’s 110 degrees,” a lot of chickens could die. They can also become stressed and physically aggressive toward one another when packed so tightly.

The US poultry industry doesn’t publish statistics on how many animals die in transport — what they call “DOAs” (dead on arrival). In the early 2000s, according to the data analytics firm Agri Stats, Inc., the DOA rate was around 0.36 percent. Assuming this hasn’t changed much (a reasonable assumption, as it’s not so different from DOA rates in many European countries), around 33.8 million chickens in the US died in transport in 2024, or 92,602 every day. (The National Chicken Council didn’t immediately respond to a request for industry DOA figures.)

To put that into context, around 33 million cattle are slaughtered for beef each year in the US.

In a 2023 report, the Animal Welfare Institute published a report that details a number of mass-death events in chicken transport. Here are just a few:

The DOA rate is even higher for pigs, with about a million every year either dead on arrival at the slaughterhouse, unable to move or keep up with other pigs after unloading, or in such a terrible state that they must be euthanized on arrival.

Similar to poultry birds, pigs and cattle are subject to extreme temperatures, but they’re often transported much further distances. And a typical beef or dairy cow is shipped multiple times to different farms, and often across state lines — not just the trip from the farm to the slaughterhouse. These long distances mean the animals are living in one another’s urine and feces while on the truck, and, according to Craig, they can experience bruising when jostled around as truckers navigate curves and bumpy roads.

Animals have no federal protections in transportation trips under 28 hours, and the federal Twenty-Eight Hour Law, intended to reduce their suffering on those longer journeys, is poorly — and rarely — enforced. The law also excludes poultry birds — the vast majority of animals raised for meat.

The average consumer, if they think about farm animal suffering at all, may only think about it in the context of factory farms or slaughterhouses. But the factory farm production chain is incredibly complex, and at each step, animals have little to no protections. That leads to tens of millions of animals dying painful deaths each year in transport alone, and virtually no companies are ever held accountable.

These deaths are just as tragic as the thousands who died in the recent USPS incident, and they are just as preventable. The meat industry could choose to pack fewer animals into each truck, require heating and cooling during transport, and give animals ample time for rest, water, and food on long journeys.

But such modest measures would cut into their margins, and if there’s one thing that should be understood about almost every major US meat company, it’s this: They will always cut corners on animal welfare to increase profit unless they’re legally required to change.